People are too obsessed with opinion polls in the US election

If we want to understand the presidential race we have to try to understand the people as well as the numbers, writes John Rentoul

Saturday 05 September 2020 20:41 BST
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Joe Biden has a seven-point lead nationally
Joe Biden has a seven-point lead nationally

I am guilty of it myself. I spend a lot of time on FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s statistics-obsessed website, and on RealClearPolitics, another US site that collates opinion polls.

I know enough about American politics to know that the national polls are not what matter. We all learned that the hard way last time, when Hillary Clinton won more votes, as the national polls suggested she would, but lost the election because she failed to win the electoral college votes of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – where state polls got it wrong.

This time, therefore, we will pay attention to state polls, but try to adjust for some of the quality problems that bedevilled them in 2016. And we will note that, although Joe Biden has a seven-point lead in national polls, in Pennsylvania, the state he currently needs to gain the 270 electoral college votes to win, he is leading by a quality-adjusted average of just 4.5 points.

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